I was driving home a few weeks ago through a canyon west of Socorro (New Mexico) when I passed a shiny, brand-new windmill. Since I can count the number of times I’ve seen a brand-new windmill on one hand (on one finger, to be completely honest), I was compelled to stop and take a few shots.
I woke up a few days later and felt exceptionally lazy. I really did want to take some photos on the other side of the Sandias with my new macro lens but I kept puttering around at home. Finally, after noon, I began hiking up the mountain. Everything was soaking wet and two different people coming down told me the rain that morning had been “torrential.”1 Turns out my laziness was exceptionally well timed that day.
I saw some lichens on a tree that I’d never noticed before. Their colors were incredibly vibrant, as was the color of the tree bark (foreground, above). I’m completely smitten with lichens even though I know almost nothing about them. There is one thing I’m pretty sure about though: they love water. They consistently look dramatically different when wet, almost as if they’re coming out of their (figurative) shells. The area above was less than one inch square.
There’s a dam in the Sandia foothills very close to where I regularly hike. It’s never been breached as far as I know; I’ve always assumed it was built as a 100-year-flood kind of protection for the houses below.2 One morning I saw two men, silhouetted by the sun behind them, walking down the steep slope of the dam. I loved the combination of their silhouettes and distorted shadows and snapped a couple of shots.
I hiked with a friend on the other side of the mountains this past Saturday. We were coming down a rather steep and narrow part of the trail when I spotted the leather flower above.3 It was one of the worst places to stop but it was also the first time that I’d seen a leather flower in the last five or six years. I screeched to a halt and took several photos. It’s one of my favorite wildflowers — not just because it’s purple but also because I see it so infrequently. Another name for it is sugarbowl; it’s a form of clematis.
Throughout the same hike, we saw multiple instances of bear corn. It appeared to grow straight up out of the ground — in fact, this batch looked as if it had pushed its way up out of the dirt exactly the way mushrooms do. It’s not a fungus however; it’s considered a wildflower and apparently it’s also a parasite.4 I’d guess this batch of bear corn was about 6 inches tall at its highest point.
For much of the hike, I thought I was seeing freshly fallen snow along the trail. But when I looked at it more closely, I realized it was all hail — thousands of tiny balls of ice.
The area immediately behind the dam appears to be a very large human-built basin significantly lower than both the surrounding landscape and the dam itself. I’ve seen mud and a few puddles in the basin, but that’s it. (So far — fingers crossed.)
Although it looks delicate, leather flower actually feels … well … pretty leathery.
This piece more or less explains bear corn’s parasitic process, although I confess I don’t know or understand most of the words it uses.
Beautiful pictures and interesting commentary.
❤️❤️❤️